Zimbra 8.8.5 ce restore from files

Hi everyone!

Not long ago I had to restore a zimbra server 8.8.5 machine full of mailboxes and emails onto a new virtual machine. For some reason I didn't have time to track down, the soap process that handles almost every zimbra server operation kept returning a 503 error, making the server unusable.

At that point I had no choice but to restore everything onto a new machine with a freshly installed zimbra server 8.8.5.

The main zimbra server folders, the ones holding the data, are:

/opt/zimbra/store/ #contiene tutte le email delle caselle
/opt/zimbra/db/ #è il database mariadb 
/opt/zimbra/index/ #contiene l'index lucene delle mail
/opt/zimbra/conf/ #contiene tutte le configurazioni di zimbra e le informazioni di ldap

Restore steps

Let's call ZimbraOld the "broken" zimbra machine and ZimbraNew the new machine with the freshly installed zimbra server.

You can quickly install two test zimbra servers using vagrant+ansible, here's the project link for installing zimbra server 8.8.5: https://github.com/nutellinoit/zimbra-ansible-playground

To avoid any installation issues, before installing the ZimbraNew machine you need to stop all services on the ZimbraOld machine and change its ip address.

The command to stop all services is

su - zimbra
zmcontrol stop

Let's also check that no orphan processes are still running with

ps -aux | grep zimbra

Now we can install ZimbraNew on a new machine that has ZimbraOld's old ip.

Once the ZimbraNew installation is done and we've checked that everything works properly, we can move on to transferring the data.

So on the ZimbraNew machine we stop all zimbra services.

su - zimbra
zmcontrol stop

From the ZimbraOld machine we set up a key-based ssh connection from the root user to the root user of ZimbraNew

# se non abbiamo ancora creato la nostra chiave
ssh-keygen -t rsa

# copiamo la chiave con
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa root@ZimbraNew

Once that's done, we can use rsync commands without worrying about typing the password every time.

So from ZimbraOld we run the following commands

# Copiamo file e database
rsync -a --delete /opt/zimbra/store/ root@ZimbraNew:/opt/zimbra/store
rsync -a --delete /opt/zimbra/db/ root@ZimbraNew:/opt/zimbra/db
rsync -a --delete /opt/zimbra/index/ root@ ZimbraNew:/opt/zimbra/index

# Copiamo le configurazioni
rsync -av --delete --exclude=data.mdb /opt/zimbra/data/ root@ZimbraNew:/opt/zimbra/data

It's very important to exclude the data.mdb file from this copy, since it's a sparsebundle. If you try to copy it (like I did the first time) it will fill up the destination disk.

Now we need to copy this infamous data.mdb

The commands to run are the following:

from ZimbraOld (as root):

mdb_copy /opt/zimbra/data/ldap/mdb/db /opt/zimbra/backup/ldap/mdb/db
cd /opt/zimbra/backup/
tar -zcvf archivioldap.tar.gz ldap/
scp archivioldap.tar.gz root@ZimbraNew:/opt/zimbra/backup/

now let's move to ZimbraNew (as root):

cd /opt/zimbra/backup/
chmod 777  archivioldap.tar.gz
tar -zxvf archivioldap.tar.gz
su - zimbra
cd ldap/mdb/db/
mv data.mdb ../../../../data/ldap/mdb/db/

With all that done, it should be enough to run from ZimbraNew (as the zimbra user)

zmcontrol start

Et voilà! The new server will hold all the data of the old one!.

Possible problems with self signed certificates

If you run into certificate problems (if you have self signed certificates) follow these steps:

/opt/zimbra/bin/zmcertmgr createca -new
/opt/zimbra/bin/zmcertmgr deployca

#impostiamo a 10 anni circa la scadenze
/opt/zimbra/bin/zmcertmgr createcrt -new -days 3650

/opt/zimbra/bin/zmcertmgr deploycrt self 

/opt/zimbra/bin/zmcertmgr viewdeployedcrt

su - zimbra
zmcontrol restart